Paul Provenza may be a comedian, but he’s a pretty classy clown. One of the few American comics to study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), he’s made a name for himself by interviewing other comics, most recently for his Showtime series, “The Green Room with Paul Provenza.” So who cracks him up most?

“David Attell is one of the funniest people on earth,” he says. “It’s actually impossible for him to put three words together without slaying the entire room. He’s smart, silly and completely inappropriate — and to me, there’s nothing funnier.” And funnily enough, Provenza’s favorite reading skews to the serious. Here’s what’s in his library.

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

My dad was an industrial chemist and I went to the Bronx High School of Science. This book changed my life as a teenager. Its look at life and society as a kind of macrocosm of individual cellular biology informs my worldview to this day. The ideas in it can rock one’s world . . . this is the book that coined the term and popularized the idea of “memes.”

Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

A humpbacked albino dwarf, piano-playing Siamese twins and a fish-like boy are just the beginning. Children of a circus family, engineered in the womb by carny parents for maximum sideshow value, these “freaks” provide an outsider’s view of the human condition. Extraordinary writing makes the repugnance of this story stunningly, beautifully touching.

Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

This was on a recommended reading list at RADA. It’s written by a poet who mentors an aspiring poet by slyly declining to separate the art of writing poetry from the “art” of living life. It succeeds in making concrete the vague ideas of art and happiness — while pain and suffering become more and more indistinguishable from the process of creating truth and beauty, in poetry and life.

Globalization and Its Discontents

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

I think greed is the greatest evil known to mankind. This is a big-picture view of everything we deal with every day. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes from deep inside the workings of government policy, the banking industry, Wall Street, monetary think tanks, the World Bank and the IMF. This helped me understand how global inequity is simply not inevitable, it is chosen.